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Nobody will use this, it takes too much time and it ruins the art by adding a weird texture. I understand the disappointment of real artists that the tech bros

Nobody will use this, it takes too much time and it ruins the art by adding a weird texture. I understand the disappointment of real artists that the tech bros are stealing their lunch, but sadly it's the way all these things go. Pandora's box is opened, things aren't going to go back the way they were. Even if an artist manages to completely guard themselves against exploitation by AI, the market expectation for art commissions and work will be 100x higher than it was before AI art in a few years. It's like the scene in There Will be Blood, and the milkshake of traditional artists has been drunk already.

anonylizard 4y ago
This, trying to use this to stop AI art, is like trying to stop climate change, except 10000 times harder. 1.Like climate change, its a commons issue. AI learns from the artists at large, so a single artist protecting themselves does nothing. Nobody copies specific artists except the very top tier who have distinct and beautiful styles. 2.AIs will still have all the art produced before 2023 to train on. Which is a gigantic amount with huge room for optimization in training. 3.This can be trivially circumvented. Given the requirement of the glazed image to look identical to the human eye, it must be possible informationally to reproduce the image without the glaze. 4. It should be trivial to train a quick GAN to revert this glaze, given you can trivially artificially create before-after datasets using this very tool.
- gwoolhurme 4y ago
  I don't really like this view point, respectfully. It reads like "learn to code" except now that it is coming for programming as well. Perhaps the new slogan should be learn to plumb. Your point about climate change is apt, just because it is hard doesn't mean there should not be some sort of protections put in place to protect intellectual property of the artists. Overtrained AI produce something similar to plagiarism. There should be legal protections against that.
  - Kalium 4y ago
    OK. Let's assume legal protections are put in place tomorrow and today's living artists magically (because it skips all the details of "How do you make that work?") acquire all the rights and enforcement abilities they could wish for. What do we expect changes? I think the uncomfortable answer is that for a lot of commercial art uses, nothing changes. In many cases people just want something to fulfill a need and aren't really all that picky about it. Maybe the style changes to be one of the Old Masters instead of something current. Getting it fast and cheap means they don't have to think about it much. A great many commercial art jobs will vanish just as they will outside this hypothetical. Perhaps we should pause and identify what outcome we want before prescribing policy. Are rights our priority, or are we trying to secure the incomes of artists?
    - gwoolhurme 4y ago
      I don’t know I truly don’t. I don’t have any answers. Because you might be right. Especially for commercial art. Just the same as climate change, I don’t see any solution. It all gets worse and worse for everyone involved, except a select few. The outcome I would assume, would be that the livelihoods of artists are protected, or at the minimum that if they do not want a program to mimic a clearly unique style, that it doesn’t. That might just be pie in the sky dreaming at this point though. All desk work is going to disappear, everyone will be displaced.
      - Kalium 4y ago
        What is your goal here? What outcome do you want to achieve? It sounds like your primary goal is financial, with rights being a means to an end. Is that accurate?
        gwoolhurme 4y ago
        That might be accurate, however it is not just financial right? I would say that is the bulk of it though. To the self-worth side of it, someone posted below, but humans tie self worth to their profession as well right? That is probably something wrong with society as a whole but that is how people work as of this day. In the case of an artist (I am not an artist just to be clear), they've worked decades to hone this craft correct? To have it scraped and used to a level that only a machine can do. Something about that feels wrong? I get that is an emotional appeal. Which is probably why I will never write policy.
cobertos 4y ago
And yet watermarks are a thing. I'm skeptical that no one will use this, especially if you can put it into a pipeline of multiple image transformations that "protect art". It could be bundled into tools or on platforms themselves as part of their value add. YouTube already transcodes your videos, why not DeviantArt encode your art except to verified human accounts or something? Their efficacy is the more interesting question to me.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > And yet watermarks are a thing. The full-resolution examples I’ve seen have shown this as much more destructive to the underlying art than usual watermarks, to the point where I’m not even convinced people would use it on samples when the underlying art wasn’t displayed online but sold through other channels. > YouTube already transcodes your videos, why not DeviantArt encode your art except to verified human accounts or something? So the idea is to be “protected” against automated scrapers building datasets for training, say, the core StabilityDiffusion models, but not against the huge number of individuals training (and remixing) checkpoints/loras/TIs/Aesthetic Gradients and exchanging them that are driving the ecosystem?
  - cobertos 4y ago
    Maybe you have a different viewpoint of the ecosystem than me? Everyone I know that's used this is not an AI expert but still tech savvy. None of them have trained their own models. The path of least resistance for them would be to work around the "protected" art if they were doing something more custom For someone with more effort and time to dedicate to cloning a specific artist, maybe not as useful. But I know less of this type of use case/the tools in that part of the ecosystem
    - dragonwriter 4y ago
      > Maybe you have a different viewpoint of the ecosystem than me? Everyone I know that’s used this is not an AI expert but still tech savvy. None of them have trained their own models. Look at something like Civitai [0] and the number of users submitting things there: pretty much everything there (there’s a few things like poses and tools that aren’t) is one kind or another of trained model (though some are merges of existing models and extractions of one kind of model from another.) [0] https://civitai.com/ https://civitai.com/
Afforess 4y ago
> * Nobody will use this, it takes too much time and it ruins the art by adding a weird texture.* New Cloudflare offering: ECA: Edge Cloaked Artwork. Enabled at the edge with our blazing fast CDN, ECA is a brand new Cloudflare service that offers a groundbreaking solution for digital artists and creators! With our CDN network, we can now cloak artwork to protect it from unauthorized use, while still maintaining its visual appeal to the human eye. Our technology modifies the data of your artwork in a way that's invisible to the naked eye, making it nearly impossible for AI companies to use your artwork in their training samples. This not only ensures that your artwork is protected, but also helps prevent the proliferation of unethical AI practices. Trust us to safeguard your artwork and its value like never before. Try Cloudflare's artwork cloaking service today and experience the peace of mind that comes with true digital security. - CHATGPT 3.5 Feel free to re-use Cloudflare.
not-chatgpt 4y ago
The description (as well as the project as a whole) is incredibly disingenuous and capitalized heavily on artist's fear of being trained by AI. Even one pass of SD's img2img with low denoise is enough to bypass this data poisoning attack. It's a useless attack that makes training a tidbit more inconvenient. The project also gained infamy when it stole code from an open source project with GPL license without giving credits. Additionally, SD now offers opt outs for artists and MD likely does not train on these artists at all, and there are way more effective ways to protect art than using this algorithm.
- atleastoptimal 4y ago
  This project and a lot of projects in the future will be in a similar vein. Something that appeals to the fear of being cheated or made irrelevant by AI by returning primacy to the human. It all seems good intentioned but also naïve, like when robots take over doing all surgery and massively reduce the risk of accidental death, surgeons will get together and insist they ban the robots and that humans still do it better, even if they don't.
2muchcoffeeman 4y ago
If it’s too late then why wouldn’t they use it? May as well poison the well on the way out right?
Techonomicon 4y ago
This is entirely false. My s.o is relatively well known in comic art communities and they (and many others) are using this right now. I don't think HN quite grasps how much artists are trying to ensure ownership and governance over their art.

anonylizard 4y ago

This, trying to use this to stop AI art, is like trying to stop climate change, except 10000 times harder. 1.Like climate change, its a commons issue. AI learns from the artists at large, so a single artist protecting themselves does nothing. Nobody copies specific artists except the very top tier who have distinct and beautiful styles. 2.AIs will still have all the art produced before 2023 to train on. Which is a gigantic amount with huge room for optimization in training. 3.This can be trivially circumvented. Given the requirement of the glazed image to look identical to the human eye, it must be possible informationally to reproduce the image without the glaze. 4. It should be trivial to train a quick GAN to revert this glaze, given you can trivially artificially create before-after datasets using this very tool.

gwoolhurme 4y ago
I don't really like this view point, respectfully. It reads like "learn to code" except now that it is coming for programming as well. Perhaps the new slogan should be learn to plumb. Your point about climate change is apt, just because it is hard doesn't mean there should not be some sort of protections put in place to protect intellectual property of the artists. Overtrained AI produce something similar to plagiarism. There should be legal protections against that.
- Kalium 4y ago
  OK. Let's assume legal protections are put in place tomorrow and today's living artists magically (because it skips all the details of "How do you make that work?") acquire all the rights and enforcement abilities they could wish for. What do we expect changes? I think the uncomfortable answer is that for a lot of commercial art uses, nothing changes. In many cases people just want something to fulfill a need and aren't really all that picky about it. Maybe the style changes to be one of the Old Masters instead of something current. Getting it fast and cheap means they don't have to think about it much. A great many commercial art jobs will vanish just as they will outside this hypothetical. Perhaps we should pause and identify what outcome we want before prescribing policy. Are rights our priority, or are we trying to secure the incomes of artists?
  - gwoolhurme 4y ago
    I don’t know I truly don’t. I don’t have any answers. Because you might be right. Especially for commercial art. Just the same as climate change, I don’t see any solution. It all gets worse and worse for everyone involved, except a select few. The outcome I would assume, would be that the livelihoods of artists are protected, or at the minimum that if they do not want a program to mimic a clearly unique style, that it doesn’t. That might just be pie in the sky dreaming at this point though. All desk work is going to disappear, everyone will be displaced.
    - Kalium 4y ago
      What is your goal here? What outcome do you want to achieve? It sounds like your primary goal is financial, with rights being a means to an end. Is that accurate?
      - gwoolhurme 4y ago
        That might be accurate, however it is not just financial right? I would say that is the bulk of it though. To the self-worth side of it, someone posted below, but humans tie self worth to their profession as well right? That is probably something wrong with society as a whole but that is how people work as of this day. In the case of an artist (I am not an artist just to be clear), they've worked decades to hone this craft correct? To have it scraped and used to a level that only a machine can do. Something about that feels wrong? I get that is an emotional appeal. Which is probably why I will never write policy.

cobertos 4y ago

And yet watermarks are a thing. I'm skeptical that no one will use this, especially if you can put it into a pipeline of multiple image transformations that "protect art". It could be bundled into tools or on platforms themselves as part of their value add. YouTube already transcodes your videos, why not DeviantArt encode your art except to verified human accounts or something? Their efficacy is the more interesting question to me.

dragonwriter 4y ago
> And yet watermarks are a thing. The full-resolution examples I’ve seen have shown this as much more destructive to the underlying art than usual watermarks, to the point where I’m not even convinced people would use it on samples when the underlying art wasn’t displayed online but sold through other channels. > YouTube already transcodes your videos, why not DeviantArt encode your art except to verified human accounts or something? So the idea is to be “protected” against automated scrapers building datasets for training, say, the core StabilityDiffusion models, but not against the huge number of individuals training (and remixing) checkpoints/loras/TIs/Aesthetic Gradients and exchanging them that are driving the ecosystem?
- cobertos 4y ago
  Maybe you have a different viewpoint of the ecosystem than me? Everyone I know that's used this is not an AI expert but still tech savvy. None of them have trained their own models. The path of least resistance for them would be to work around the "protected" art if they were doing something more custom For someone with more effort and time to dedicate to cloning a specific artist, maybe not as useful. But I know less of this type of use case/the tools in that part of the ecosystem
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    > Maybe you have a different viewpoint of the ecosystem than me? Everyone I know that’s used this is not an AI expert but still tech savvy. None of them have trained their own models. Look at something like Civitai [0] and the number of users submitting things there: pretty much everything there (there’s a few things like poses and tools that aren’t) is one kind or another of trained model (though some are merges of existing models and extractions of one kind of model from another.) [0] https://civitai.com/ https://civitai.com/

Afforess 4y ago

> * Nobody will use this, it takes too much time and it ruins the art by adding a weird texture.* New Cloudflare offering: ECA: Edge Cloaked Artwork. Enabled at the edge with our blazing fast CDN, ECA is a brand new Cloudflare service that offers a groundbreaking solution for digital artists and creators! With our CDN network, we can now cloak artwork to protect it from unauthorized use, while still maintaining its visual appeal to the human eye. Our technology modifies the data of your artwork in a way that's invisible to the naked eye, making it nearly impossible for AI companies to use your artwork in their training samples. This not only ensures that your artwork is protected, but also helps prevent the proliferation of unethical AI practices. Trust us to safeguard your artwork and its value like never before. Try Cloudflare's artwork cloaking service today and experience the peace of mind that comes with true digital security. - CHATGPT 3.5 Feel free to re-use Cloudflare.

not-chatgpt 4y ago

The description (as well as the project as a whole) is incredibly disingenuous and capitalized heavily on artist's fear of being trained by AI. Even one pass of SD's img2img with low denoise is enough to bypass this data poisoning attack. It's a useless attack that makes training a tidbit more inconvenient. The project also gained infamy when it stole code from an open source project with GPL license without giving credits. Additionally, SD now offers opt outs for artists and MD likely does not train on these artists at all, and there are way more effective ways to protect art than using this algorithm.

atleastoptimal 4y ago
This project and a lot of projects in the future will be in a similar vein. Something that appeals to the fear of being cheated or made irrelevant by AI by returning primacy to the human. It all seems good intentioned but also naïve, like when robots take over doing all surgery and massively reduce the risk of accidental death, surgeons will get together and insist they ban the robots and that humans still do it better, even if they don't.

2muchcoffeeman 4y ago

If it’s too late then why wouldn’t they use it? May as well poison the well on the way out right?

Techonomicon 4y ago

This is entirely false. My s.o is relatively well known in comic art communities and they (and many others) are using this right now. I don't think HN quite grasps how much artists are trying to ensure ownership and governance over their art.